The FSA advised ministers in England and Wales earlier this month to authorize the first three ≥98% purity CBD novel food applications submitted by Cannaray Brands Ltd, the European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA) and Chanelle McCoy CBD Ltd, with approximately 3,000 individual CBD products linked to the applications on the Public List.
Discussing what sets their product apart from others, Caroline Coen, co-founder & CSO of Chanelle McCoy Health, noted their CBD is ultra-pure, with no THC or other cannabinoids.
“We committed to the Novel Food process from the very beginning and invested a great deal of time, work and money in doing everything properly, so it is wonderful to see that commitment being recognized,” she added.
In its board meeting notes published on Sept. 3, the FSA stated the progress made on these CBD applications represents “a major milestone in the regulation of the CBD food sector”.
“Should ministers agree to these proposals, the resultant authorizations will be a regulatory first for Great Britain,” it said. “These recommendations therefore represent a significant step towards moving the CBD market into regulatory compliance, supporting consumer confidence under the novel foods framework.”
The report, however, also notes the ongoing UK–EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) negotiations, which seek to increase regulatory harmonization between the UK and Europe and reduce cross-border red tape through “dynamic alignment”.
Mark Tallon, PhD, managing partner of food law firm Legal Foods, however, previously warned that if the UK aligns with EU food safety standards, authority over novel foods could effectively shift to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), potentially rendering domestic approvals obsolete.
EFSA recently introduced a substantially lower provisional safe level for CBD than the FSA of 2 mg/day for a 70 kg adult, citing safety concerns. It has also terminated many CBD novel food applications due to insufficient data and non-compliance.
Noting this ongoing concern, the FSA stated it “has continued to progress applications in accordance with the prioritization principles agreed by the FSA and FSS boards in December 2025. Considering these first CBD authorizations is consistent with these principles.”
Final closure for domestic process?
Stephen Oliver, co-founder of MAST Consulting and co-founder at The Canna Consultants, said that while the update might be positive news for the three applicants, given the ongoing SPS consultation, he would not be celebrating a win for the wider CBD industry just yet.
“I suspect a significant part of the industry will initially see the three recommendations as evidence that the logjam has finally broken and that authorizations are now coming,” he said. “My concern is that this may raise expectations at precisely the point when the wider regulatory environment is moving in the opposite direction.”
He noted the FSA has published 14 positive safety assessments for >97% pure CBD novel foods, to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, so questioned what the outcome of those would be.
For Oliver, the key questions are whether the ministers will authorize the applications and, most importantly, whether the SPS negotiations leave sufficient scope for those authorizations to remain meaningful over the long term.
He also questions whether, by sending the applications to ministers while explicitly acknowledging the SPS negotiations, EFSA’s divergent position and developments on reproductive toxicity, the FSA was effectively signalling that it had taken the domestic process as far as it could.
Applicants have spent years and substantial sums navigating the FSA’s statutory process; the EIHA consortium, for example, reportedly budgeted around €3.5 million for toxicology assessments.
If the political or regulatory landscape ultimately prevents these authorizations from taking effect or leads to their withdrawal, the FSA will nevertheless have completed its assessments and made its recommendations to ministers.
“After nearly seven years of uncertainty for the CBD industry, ‘we did all we could’ may prove to be a very important (defendable) position,” Oliver said.
Jerome Le Bloch, head of scientific affairs at Foodchain ID, warned if the SPS agreement is applied without an exemption for CBD, any novel food application made in the UK that was not also made to EFSA will not be authorized.
“There is a risk for companies which applied only in UK to have to start everything from scratch in EU, and to lose all the work performed since 2020,” he said.
Looking to the future, Oliver predicted that there could be a very limited market in the UK for highly purified or synthetic CBD at very low exposure levels but noted “that is a fundamentally different proposition from the UK CBD market that businesses have spent the last seven years trying to legitimize.”
The seven year saga
The update follows a regulatory rollercoaster for the CBD industry starting in early 2020 when the FSA first announced CBD would be authorized as a novel food. While the announcement was initially hailed as an opportunity for the UK to be a leader in CBD innovation, delays, confusion and increasing costs soon revealed this was not to be a smooth road towards regulatory approval.
A significant speed bump came when the FSA reduced its provisional acceptable daily intake for CBD from 70 mg to 10 mg/day in October 2023. Before the guidance changed, many market formulations—particularly single-serve formats like canned drinks—contained at least 12.5 mg to 15 mg of CBD per unit, while oil tinctures routinely provided 20 mg or more per serving.
The FSA Scientific Committee issued its first two safety endorsements to dossiers submitted by Cannaray Brands and Chanelle McCoy in the spring of 2024. This was hailed as the conclusion to a ”seemingly never-ending saga” at the time.
In the summer of 2025, the European Commission published negotiating mandates related to the “dynamic alignment” of Sanitary & Phytosanitary (SPS). While the mandates aim to streamline trade and reduce border friction, Dr. Tallon has warned that strict expectations from EFSA could be coming to the UK’s CBD sector.
Discussing the latest FSA update, Dr. Tallon said the future of the industry “is in the hands of policy experts”.
He added: “The real issue here has been the loss of people’s business and livelihoods over a poor handling and a disregard for EFSA’s and the UK’s guidance and laws on how novel foods should be assessed. Legal and regulatory academics will be writing on this for some years. But will we see a change in how UK Gov interact with business? I doubt it.”
